Guild Wars 2

I have a retal stacking build but haven’t used it much, typically I come to the forums first before I splurge for armor and weapons, so here I am. What is y’all’s opinions on retal stacking in PvE?

You should try to avoid damage – not facetank it. A boss with 1.000.000 HP hits you (15-25k HP) for 5k damage, so you can return a 1k retal? I don’t think thats worth it.

It’s nice to have, but you shouldn’t base your entire build around it.

Bosses in lvl 80 dungeons have around 1.500.000 hp, in high level fractals much more (since they don’t get any armour, just hp and damage). Even with 3000 power your retal will deal around 425 damage which is much less than autoattacks.

It’s handy in some scenarios, but it’s a sideshow, not a first line of damage (similar to our burning output). There are scenarios where you can’t avoid 100% of the damage, and other scenarios (enemies with flamethrowers, anyone?) where having retaliation (and hopefully protection) on an entire group and facetanking will kill enemies faster than any amount of direct damage would. Those situations are few and far between, but they do occur.

I tried that very shortly. Wasn’t impressed.

retal works best when you have people hitting you for multiple hits over a short period of time. of which, most mobs in PvE don’t do. they simply attack too slow for retal to be meaningful truly meaningful.

retaliation should be % of damage …..

Retaliation’s purpose right now, both in PvE and PvP, is to punish burst-hit mechanics. This plays a role in PvP of making opponents think, rather than simply spamming rapid-hitting attacks. These rapid attacks have the advantages of making dodging less useful (thinking of something like thief’s Unload: even if you dodge through the bulk of the attack, you’re still going to get hit by a couple of the shots), as well as mostly ignoring other boons such as aegis and conditions such as blind. That being the case, rapid attacks have very little counterplay; retaliation is the answer to them.

In PvE, its purpose is a bit more nebulous, but having access to it for those few situations in which mobs employ rapid attacks is still useful. As such, it’s an additional tool to help out DPS in conjunction with protection/regeneration, not necessarily something to focus on.

In both of these scenarios, setting retaliation up as a % of incoming damage would do away with its original purpose.

• In PvP, it would be a counter to all damage skills. Case in point: Kill Shot compared to Unload. Currently, Unload takes far more retaliation damage. If retaliation returned a percentage of damage dealt, Kill Shot would be hit far harder than Unload. Furthermore, it would lose its primary current function: that is, giving some method to counter those rapid-attack skills. It would still counter them to an extent, but it would counter everything else to the same extent, converting it from a counter to a primary damage source.
• In PvE, I could sort of see it. However, it still wouldn’t change the fact that enemy attacks would hurt you a lot more than they’d hurt the mobs, and it would change it from a situational counter to specific enemies to a boon that all parties would want to have, permanently, in order to maximize DPS (albeit incidental DPS). Despite running a build that’s capable of providing permanent retaliation easily, I don’t want to see it become an absolute requirement in groups. As it stands it’s a nice-to-have, not a requirement, and it should remain such.